Large Animals in Everyday Life

by Wendy Brenner

  He looked again at the little instrument and thought, That’s me. A big zero, coming and going. Nothing will ever change—I am invisible. He grabbed at the phone’s receiver and punched the buttons hard, hurting his finger. I’ve had it with this secret life, he would tell her. Keep your deceptions, your illusions, your stupid, hopeful Trinidadian. Without you my life will open up like a wonderful picture book, what people know of me will be the truth. The phone was ringing blankly in his ear. It went on, ringing and stopping, ringing and stopping. He let his head fall for a moment and felt the blood rushing to his face like a child’s hot tears. He felt like a child planning to run away from home. His courage was already dissolving, he could not sustain it. Fine, I’ll call her later, he told himself. From the hotel, let the University pay for it. But even as he thought this, it was already passing out of him, going out of reach like a helium balloon. It was passing out of him and it was gone. He lifted up his head and landed back in the sweet hopelessness of his life. The oysters awaited him.

  • • •

  The oysters felt different, but it was difficult for them to say how. They felt as though something had been added or something taken away. They felt vaguely the urge to produce pearls, but they could not produce them. Clearly, they were leaving something behind, moving with smooth speed away from something of great importance, but what this thing was they could not remember. They felt frustrated, distracted. Where were they going? they wondered. What would happen to them? What were they supposed to do? Oh, they were only oysters! Who was there to tell their story, and who was there to listen?

  the child

  The child was scared of everything. She was scared of being left alone but scared of baby-sitters, especially the young ones who wore black eyeliner. The child’s mother owned a tube of black eyeliner which the child could go look at anytime, sitting unassumingly in its basket on the bathroom counter, but the child wasn’t scared of that. She was scared of the violent sound of her own bathwater running. When it was time for her bath, her mother would run the water and she would stay in her room with the door closed until the tub was full. But even in her room, she was scared the walls of the house would fall down. First the pictures would fall off the walls and then, a second later, the walls themselves would go, breaking apart at the corners and crashing down to the ground. She could see it so clearly, sometimes she ran fretfully from room to room, desperate for relief. Her stomach hurt when she was scared, so now she was scared of her own stomach, of its mysterious acid whims. It could start up at any moment.

  “She just has a fast metabolism,” the child’s blasé grandmother said. The child had a blasé grandmother and a passionate grandmother. The two grandmothers sat on adjacent identical striped sofas in the living room of the child’s house, watching the child practice headstands using the tripod method. They did not care for each other, though they both certainly adored the child. They lived only blocks apart, so whenever they were coming to visit the child, the blasé grandmother picked up the passionate grandmother, who didn’t drive. When they arrived at the child’s house, they often did not come inside immediately but could be seen sitting for minutes parked in the driveway, arguing silently behind the windshield of the blasé grandmother’s sky-blue Chevy Nova.

  “There’s nothing wrong with the child’s metabolism,” the passionate grandmother told the blasé grandmother. But in her head she was not so sure. It was a fact that the child could not eat enough, could not seem to keep up her weight. What if it were true? the passionate grandmother thought. She often lay awake at night worrying about the child, and as the child grew, the grandmother’s visions grew more vivid. Metabolism, my God! she thought. The child was digesting herself out of existence, evaporating by invisible increments every minute, even now, right here in front of them! The passionate grandmother stood abruptly and left the room, her eyes wild.

  “Grandmother, wait, look,” the child cried, in a muffled, upside-down voice.

  “Back in a sec, duckie,” the passionate grandmother called tremulously from the powder room. She shut herself in and sat on the fluffy blue toilet seat cover, clutching an embroidered guest towel to her stomach and imagining outrageous things. She imagined the child years from now, lost to the world, out in the dark city without grandmothers to guide her. The child would suffer flat tires, unemployment, hepatitis. In an effort to escape her parents, she would suffer any number of things. She would live in the back room of a run-down theater, eating off a hot plate and sleeping alone on a giant foam rubber pea-pod costume. The passionate grandmother could see it so clearly, she could barely catch her breath. The child was crying alone, her small sobs lost to the dark Chicago winter. The child was blindfolded and tied to a cot with Marshall Field’s gold Christmas package string, letting a young man with glasses and a mustache tickle her most private parts!

  The passionate grandmother had not asked to receive these telegraphic messages, but she was definitely receiving them. Her son, the child’s father, was no help; he only told her she was being irrational. And her daughter-in-law—forget it! The passionate grandmother had once, nine years earlier, called her daughter-in-law a bad word, and that word had never been forgotten. The daughter-in-law carried the word around like an invisible helium balloon fastened to her wrist. The passionate grandmother sat there sniffing a fragrant yellow guest soap in the shape of a bunny, trying to calm her senses.

  “When I’m done I want to show you something else,” the child was saying to the blasé grandmother in the living room. The blasé grandmother sat solidly on her sofa, her hands folded in her lap, watching the powder room door and shaking her head. She wished for a cigarette, but she would have had to go outside to smoke it, a new rule made by the child’s parents, even though it was the middle of winter, and what was one cigarette going to do to the child? On the other hand, knowing what was now known, she supposed that this was only being rational.

  The blasé grandmother was the mother of the child’s mother and was divorced. Not once but twice. She’d had her fill, she often declared these days. Her husbands were the least of her problems, really. She had come over on a boat from Hungary at the age of three, worked odd jobs for pay at the age of nine, and while raising her daughter, in between husbands, had never once paid for a single grocery item without using a coupon. Now, thanks to the divorces, she had plenty of money, not to mention a Senior Citizen card that made her eligible for fabulous bargains on almost everything. What was life for, if not to enjoy the nicer things? She owned so many floral-patterned silk scarves that she had lost count. She wore them draped and pinned artfully over her shoulders, and she enjoyed without guilt the sundry and not-so-sundry comforts and privileges now afforded her. She wanted the best for her grandchild, but she did not understand the problem. She personally had never flown off the handle in her life.

  The passionate grandmother was the mother of the child’s father and was widowed. Her husband had been a sober podiatrist who tried always to set aside his petty desires and work for the greater good, but in private he was a different kind of man, and she had enjoyed him terribly, at a time when this was considered unusual, even unnatural. They were especially fond of playing shocking practical jokes on each other at sacred moments, although many people who knew them well would have found this hard to believe. If anyone ever found out what she’d hidden in his can of foot powder on their honeymoon! She was a worrier even then, however, and when her son was a baby she bought for him a plastic amulet embossed with the message DON’T KISS ME in large ornate letters and strung on a white ribbon so it could hang enchantingly around his neck, protecting him from the germs of well-meaning strangers in public places. Then, after the baby was safely grown and away at college, her husband had one afternoon popped his handsome head up out of the crawl space and said, “I am a goblin of the deep,” and she had laughed at him from the kitchen, where she was chopping carrots, and then he’d gone back down and had a cerebral hemorrhage and died.

  Surp
risingly, that event had not changed her personality much. During all those years she was enthusiastically loving her husband, she had in fact been living for her child—a guilty secret which had, she suspected, helped or even allowed her to love her husband. So, after grieving for him a while in public and a while longer in private, she went on living for her child, just as she always had, and when that was no longer realistic, she lived for her child’s child. Why else did one live? she wondered. The child’s fears were her own, and she would fight, if necessary, to keep from relinquishing them.

  The child is scared of everything, the child’s parents said. They recited this to strangers in department stores and waiting rooms and restaurants, even if the child was sitting quietly at that moment. It was impossible to take her anywhere, they said. They said it sometimes with scorn, other times irony, and still other times resignation. They took the child to a restaurant called the Ivanhoe that featured catacombs you descended to by elevator. The catacombs contained creative surprises especially for children, the nice lady who ran the elevator said. She had a sweet, apologetic voice and yellow hair in the shape of an optimistic, upward-floating bubble. Nevertheless, the child refused to go. Well, she got into the elevator but then caused such a scene the elevator had to be stopped and reversed. Of course, what were we thinking? the child’s parents said. She’s scared of everything, they told the nice lady. The lady worriedly worked the controls, her hair aquiver with concern. And whatever she isn’t scared of, she feels sorry for, they told her.

  Next door to the child lived an exceedingly large black dog. Half Great Dane, half Rottweiler, half Clydesdale, the dog’s owner liked to say. He was a fat-cheeked personal injury attorney who advertised on the local TV channel. “An accident is just that—an accident,” he said on his commercial. One would have thought the child would have been scared of the dog, but she wasn’t. She was worried about the dog. The dog lived in a chain-link fenced enclosure that gave it plenty of room to run, but it didn’t run much. It stood dead-still, right up next to the fence on the side of its enclosure that bordered the child’s yard, its boulder-sized head pointed at the child’s back door. If someone stepped outside, the dog began to tremble, and then, if the person took one more step toward the enclosure, the dog hurled itself into the air, releasing a heartbreaking bark so loud and deep it was difficult to comprehend. The dog was lonely! The child visited the dog often, poking her fingers through the chain-link grid to pet the animal. The dog would turn sideways, shivering with desire, and when her fingers touched its side it would shut its eyes, a cracking noise seeming to come from deep within it. The child could not stand to hear the noise. And the fence drove her crazy—she could only squeeze four fingers through and then she could barely move her hand at all. The dog barked and shivered and hurled itself about, desperate for her, and she pushed her fingers through and moved them dutifully back and forth in a spot the size of a baseball card. The dog was so big, and she could touch so little of it!

  Her parents gave each other knowing looks when they saw the child doing this. The child was going to ask for a dog. They were good parents and they could see it coming. They were better parents than a lot of parents. There was a boy in the child’s second-grade class whose mother whipped him with a Hot Wheels racetrack, for instance. It was common knowledge. And the three Logan children could be seen any Sunday morning picking Japanese beetles from the trees in their yard and dropping them into Chase & Sanborn coffee cans of gasoline, their father grimly supervising from behind the picture window, his arms folded. The child’s parents would never do anything like that. When it was time, they would get the child a dog and the dog would teach the child valuable skills while helping her get over her fears.

  Actually, though, the child didn’t want a dog. What she wanted more than anything was an invisible-dog leash. The leash looked like a regular leash but extended magically out into the air by itself and hung there as though an invisible dog were on it, the dog’s neck filling out the open “O” of the collar. The leash was red, or at least all the ones the child had seen were red. The child asked for one for Christmas every year but she never got one. It was just plain stupid, her parents said, not even funny. It was not even clever.

  She thought she could make one herself, maybe. She had a choice: Either find a way to make rope stiff or make something already stiff, such as a stick or pole, look like rope. Of course she had no rope, but her mother kept in the linen closet a skein of thick red yarn from which she cut lengths to tie off the child’s pigtails. The child unwound the yarn and glued it to a yardstick, but the yardstick was too stiff and did not by any stretch of the imagination appear to hang, so she removed the yarn and coated it with Elmer’s glue and lay it on the lawn to dry. But she hadn’t bargained on the yarn just soaking up the glue the way it did. It just drank it up, like it was doing it on purpose. The child began to get irritated. The yarn was not getting stiff at all. It got soggy, then rubbery, then gray from her touching it, with grass blades stuck along its underside.

  The big dog had watched her in its usual way when she first came outside, but after a while it went to sleep, lying flat with its big head resting on its front paws, still pointed right at her. She noticed this about the same time she gave up and sat back on her heels, surrounded by the horrid, ruined yarn. The dog went on sleeping, oblivious. Seeing this, she was angry, and then, a moment later, a little panicky.

  • • •

  The passionate grandmother had a secret. Obviously, she wasn’t very good at keeping her feelings to herself, but there was one thing she had not revealed to anybody, had not allowed even herself to acknowledge. Well, she had acknowledged it, but she would not turn and greet it, for that would imply recognition. She knew once she recognized it she was done for. That was the kind of secret it was. It concerned her own demise, lying in wait for her, hidden somewhere in her future. It concerned the cause of her demise, harbored invisibly within her even now, somewhere deep within her body’s connective tissue. She kept this secret not for her own sake but for the sake of the child.

  “How old are you?” the child often asked her. The passionate grandmother was a little vain. Not a lot, but somewhat vain. Oh, I was never what you would call beautiful, she sometimes said, but I knew how to walk into a room.

  “I’m as old as my tongue, and a little older than my teeth,” she told the child.

  The child loved this. “How old?” she would demand, leaping excitedly around in her grandmother’s face.

  But the passionate grandmother always said the same thing. The child usually kept on for a while and then eventually gave up. Then the two of them would sit smiling at each other in silence, each worried in her own way but still smiling at the other, at all that could not be understood about the other.

  • • •

  Christmas is coming and there is much discussion over what to get for the child. The child’s parents discuss the issue in their bedroom with their door shut; the grandmothers discuss it in the Chevy Nova on their way to and from the child’s house. The parents discuss it with the grandmothers on the telephone, abruptly falling silent when the child skips or sidles by. A puppy is not yet warranted, it is decided, so the child’s father begins construction on a dollhouse in his utility room, trying to hammer softly after the child has gone to bed. He has everything he needs: clean blond sheets of pine, glass cut to fit the windows, carpet samples to lay on the floors. It will be a three-story townhouse with an attic, two staircases, and balconies with flower boxes and real wrought-iron railings. The child’s father has never known quite what to make of the child’s fears, but he sure knows how to make a dollhouse.

  The child’s mother shops for fabrics with unusual and whimsical designs to use for the dollhouse’s curtains, bedspreads, towels, tablecloths, and wallpaper. She takes the child along on several of these excursions, her manner breezy and matter-of-fact as usual, and as usual the child prowls around the store by herself, returning to her mother’s side only to
beg her to hurry up so they can leave. The child’s mother enjoys the deception. She will tell the child after the surprise, of course; that’s half the fun. The child will demand to know on which shopping trip the fabric buying took place, and she will warn the child to pay closer attention in the future, not to be so trusting.

  The child has asked again for an invisible-dog leash, and this year it looks like she might get one, from the blasé grandmother. “That sounds like a cute idea,” the blasé grandmother says, when the child excitedly explains it to her. “See how long she likes it once she gets it,” the child’s mother says, but the blasé grandmother shrugs. The child is only a child, after all.

  The passionate grandmother is the only one who can’t figure out what to get. “She’s made a list, I’ll be happy to give you her list,” the child’s mother tells her, barely managing to conceal her exasperation. She has told the passionate grandmother this at least a half dozen times already.

  “I believe in spontaneous gift-giving,” the passionate grandmother says, not without exasperation herself. Whoever dreamed up lists?

  “Well, you’re on your own, then,” the child’s mother says. “I mean, your guess is as good as mine,” she adds, feeling a little guilty. But that’s ridiculous, why should she feel guilty? After what the woman once called her, right to her face …

  The passionate grandmother lies awake at night, wondering. The question seems somehow more pressing than it was in past years. She has been thinking about it for months, actually since long before they started up with their lists, their secrets, their smirks and whispered conversations. Items pass before her open eyes in the dark—balls, board games, sweater sets, easels—all unacceptable. As if to compensate in advance for what will turn out to be an inadequate gift, she has begun telling the child certain things, truths, more or less. “The ugly is of course more compelling than the pretty,” she tells her, for example, “although the pretty certainly enjoys its day.” Another time she tells her: “Love is more reliable than many an actuality.” Still another time she says, “Robert Dole is evil.” She doesn’t know where these statements come from; a context is never suggested. They simply arrive in her head, and so she speaks them.